Oculus Rift App Update Kills Unofficial Support for Vive Headsets

Oculus released an update to its app yesterday that has broken compatibility with an unofficial hack called Revive that previously allowed games purchased through Oculus Home to be played using an HTC Vive headset.

The update doesn’t mention it in its official release notes, but a Revive developer was quick to notice and post about it on reddit. According to the developer, the update introduces a platform integrity check when launching a game purchased through Oculus Home to ensure an Oculus Rift headset is connected; if it doesn’t find one, the game cannot be played, meaning anyone using the Revive hack to make Oculus games work with their Vive headsets is suddenly out of luck.

However, some users have reported using older development kit Oculus Rifts to fool the new DRM before connecting their Vive headsets again. As well, only games purchased through Oculus are affected, so virtual reality games purchased through Steam, for instance, do not have this added DRM.

The move is angering many fans with Vive headsets who were using Revive to buy and play Oculus games. The players point to this reddit post by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey (emphasis added):

If customers buy a game from us, I don’t care if they mod it to run on whatever they want. As I have said a million times (and counter to the current circlejerk), our goal is not to profit by locking people to only our hardware – if it was, why in the world would we be supporting GearVR and talking with other headset makers? The software we create through Oculus Studios (using a mix of internal and external developers) are exclusive to the Oculus platform, not the Rift itself.

For their part, the Revive developer mentions that while it will be “challenging to circumvent,” they are still committed to finding a way around Oculus’s new DRM measures.